Anyhow, in 1587 White and his settlers find themselves settling not Chesapeake but Roanoke Island, south of that. The previous expeditions had been of a decidedly military character, so the Indians with whom those explorers had fought didn't initially express much friendship to the new group; once Indians killed one of the colonists while he was crabbing, the colonists got worried. They sent White home to beg for assistance, which he does, leaving behind his family, including his grandchild, Virginia Dare, the first European child born on North America. It's not like he was going to be back in 45 minutes, so they made a general agreement: if they had to move, they'd leave word. If they had to leave under duress? They'd carve a Maltese cross into a tree. Going for their own purposes? They'd leave a note.

So White goes home -- and runs, inconveniently, into the Spanish Armada, or anyhow England's war with same in 1588. England wins, which is good for England, but that and the privateering that goes along with such things keeps everybody busy until 1590, at which point another ships heads off to Roanoke to see what's what.

Not much, that's what. Nobody left, and the word "Croatoan" carved into a post of the abandoned fort. No sign of a struggle. Also, "CRO" carved into a tree. Croatoan was the name of the nearby island we now call Hatteras, and the Croatan peoples there seem to have been largely friendly to the colonists. When White returned in 1590, in fact, he was overjoyed to see the carved words, believing they meant the colonists had joined the Croatans. They had plainly left without duress, and though the empty site of their previous camp was disturbed, White concluded this was the work of the unfriendly Roanoke Indians after the colonists had left.

Unfortunately, a storm was blowing up, and the sailors weren't willing to go to Hatteras to see what had happened, and that was it for that investigation. So no further information came from the colony until 1607, when the Jamestown colony in Virginia settled, and then everything got kinda wacky. John Smith -- yes, that John Smith -- heard when he was once captured that some of the colonists remained alive, and he even included locations on a map, eventually taken from him, that showed where he believed they were. He was told by others, though, that the colonists had been slaughtered. Other theories involve the colonists moving in with various other tribes -- the Lumbee have long held that some of their members descend from the Lost Colony -- or moving inland, with the discovery that a spot  on the White map covered an image of an inland fort causing something of a ruckus in 2012. 

Anyhow, an entire industry of Lost Colony theories now occupies a certain species of usually amateur historical thinker, so it would have delighted Lawson when, this very week, researchers from the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research announced that they believed they knew exactly what had happened. The colonists had decamped, headed inland, and set up shop in an area called Beechland -- it's now in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge -- and began farming sassafras, an important early export crop of the colonies, already interesting to Europeans by this time because they believed it cured syphillis, that earlier American export. Sir Francis Drake brought some sassafras to England in 1586, with the remainder of the previous Roanoke colony, and Sir Walter Raleigh did export it as early as 1602, so the idea that sassafras was behind the colony makes sense. Still, indeed an important export (second only to tobacco in the 1650s), but the theory has a few holes. How the colonists crossed 4.5 miles of open water to get to the mainland, for one, though certainly Indians could have helped. How they knew about where to begin a plantation is another. A third is why they would have carved a note saying they were going in the exact opposite direction on a tree for White to find.

The answer is the same one it usually is. Fred Willard, director of the Lost Colony Center, says the entire undertaking was an enterprise to farm and export sassafras, supported by everyone from Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth herself. Secrecy was at the core: "It was a huge, huge conspiracy," he says. Isn't it always?

Anyhow, I even bring this up because Lawson would have found the very notion of a "lost" colony laughable. He lived in a fracture zone -- where multiple cultures were coming together and mixing, with good and bad results. People lived and traded, fought and died, shared food and diseases, had children. Things got messy. Lawson actually addressed the entire Lost Colony business with barely a shrug, when talking about the Hatteras Indians.

"The first Discovery and Settlement of this Country was by the Procurement of Sir Walter Raleigh, in Conjunction with some Publick-spirited Gentlemen of that Age, under the Protection of Queen Elizabeth; for which Reason it was then named Virginia,being begun on that Part called Ronoak-Island, where the Ruins of a Fort are to be seen at this day, as well as some old EnglishCoins which have been lately found; and a Brass-Gun, a Powder-Horn, and one small Quarter deck-Gun, made of Iron Staves, and hoop'd with the same Metal; which Method of making Guns might very probably be made use of in those Days, for the Convenience of Infant-Colonies.

        A farther Confirmation of this we have from the Hatteras Indians, who either then lived on Ronoak-Island, or much frequented it. These tell us, that several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirm'd by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others. They value themselves extremely for their Affinity to the English, and are ready to do them all friendly Offices. It is probable, that this Settlement miscarry'd for want of timely Supplies from England; or thro' the Treachery of the Natives, for we may reasonably suppose that the English were forced to cohabit with them, for Relief and Conversation; and that in process of Time, they conform'd themselves to the Manners of theirIndian Relations. And thus we see, how apt Humane Nature is to degenerate.


I cannot forbear inserting here, a pleasant Story that passes for an uncontested Truth amongst the Inhabitants of this Place; which is, that the Ship which brought the first Colonies, does often appear amongst them, under Sail, in a gallant Posture, which they call Sir Walter Raleigh's Ship; And the truth of this has been affirm'd to me, by Men of the best Credit in the Country."


"The English were forced to cohabit with them, for Relief and Conversation; and that in process of Time, they conform'd themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations." To me, in one sentence, that solves the entire mystery of the Lost Colony. You put a hundred or so people on a speck of an island off the coast of an entire continent, inhabited by people who already know you're willing to kill them if it strikes your fancy. Then you go off and leave them for three years -- and you act surprised when they're not exactly where you left them? Then they leave a note telling you where they went, but you wait another decade or two before you get there to see what's what. And then you act like it's a big mystery that somehow your hundred or so people have pretty much melted into the landscape. What did you expect?

Anyhow, it is forever a delight to see where Lawson's observations lead, and how important they are to everybody trying to understand the early days of the European and North American cultures mixing up.

I'm going back on the road tomorrow. I'll let you know if I find any sassafras or any gray-eyed Indians.

I've talked a lot about various things Lawson saw on this site, and I've talked a bit about the tools I'm using to describe what I see as I follow his path. A good bit of how I'm going about that I learned 20 years ago, on a remarkable project called An Appalachian Adventure, which documented a sort of group relay through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, the  2,200-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine.

That project combined the resourced of five newspapers -- the Hartford Courant, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Maine Sunday Telegram and Portland Press-Herald, and the Raleigh News & Observer. It should tell you all you need to know about how important that project was to me that today, 20 years later, I could type in each one of those newspaper names perfectly, with hyphens and ampersands and so forth all correct. (The Atlanta paper, by the way, is so in love with its AJC abbreviation that to check the hyphen I had to go to Wikipedia -- I couldn't find the actual paper name on the website. But I checked, and it's right.) Each paper had reporters and photographers and artists hike a segment of the trail, in order, and report in once a week. All five papers ran every story -- 32 in total, if I recall correctly. As Backpacker Magazine noted, "the effort even ha[d] its own page on the World Wide Web." Gracious! The link is now dead, of course, and most of the stories live in that flickering half-light of the morgues of newspapers that just cannot figure out for the life of them some sort of way to put old stories online. Oh, if only there were some kind of technology for that! Here's a link to a summary story from the AJR, but if any of the rest is online I can't find it. It did become a book though. You can order it!

Anyhow, I even bring it up because to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our joint adventure, many of us fortunate enough to be paid to go hiking back in the day got together last week at Harpers Ferry to remember, walk, visit with the people at the Appalachian Trail Conference, and eat and drink, as you do. We had a large time.

We talked a good bit about changes in technology. Everything the Lawson Trek does instantly, alone, and on the spot -- updating blog posts from barrier islands, Instagraming from canoe in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway -- the Appalachian Adventure crew had to do in ways far more complex and with a support staff of dozens.

The photographers all talked about souping film in hotel room sinks or dropping it off at Walmart, then picking up the negatives and using scanners to ship chosen images to photo editors. Reporters recall using early laptops like the Toshiba T1000 (a svelte 9 pounds!) and wiggling telephone plugs to make decent connections to download stories to the editor. We all had drivers who would pick up our stuff and drive it along to our next weekly stops. The News & Observer even had a telephone service by which I put tape-recorded sounds (hiking, interviews, even playing the recorder I think) onto a system readers could dial in and hear. Quel interactive! I even carried a camera for a local TV station on our first trip, which meant bringing back a camera, having them look at the video, setting it up, and then interviewing me in a local park while they showed the video. I had to comment on it without watching, because having me and the anchors see the video at the same time was just too crazy.

It's all obviously different now. I live-stream with Periscope, share photos instantly with Instagram, automatically update pages on Facebook and Twitter, and carry nothing heavier than a tablet that weighs less than a pound, though even then I rarely use it -- I carry my phone, a Bluetooth keyboard, and  a set of lenses that stick to the phone, and I'm prepared to shoot, edit, produce, upload, and instantly publish words, images, sounds, and video. I joke that like Lawson I'm hiking from wifi hotspot to wifi hotspot, but the reality is I'm doing journalism in a way that wasn't even possible a few years ago.

On the other hand, the journalism itself hasn't changed, and we should all remind ourselves of that. My job is still to tell the story as clearly and honestly as possible. I still need to get my facts and names straight, still need to tell a story somebody wants to read, watch, or listen to, still need to respect my story, my sources, and my medium. If my stories CAN go up faster, that doesn't mean they DO or they SHOULD. Sometimes I blog while I'm on the trail, but I found out early on that blogging daily was more than people wanted to know, so I blog only a couple times a week while I'm traveling, and sometimes less than that while off the trail. More than, say, 4 Instagram images a day is just overkill, so I very rarely do that (and when I do I am usually wrong for doing it).

When we did Appalachian Adventure, all five papers got together and set up a loose agreement on topics for each week's story -- that is, I wasn't just hiking: I was hiking and thinking about geology, and I was presumed to have done s bit of research before leaving home. That way we avoided 32 weeks of "Woohoo, look at me! Here I am on the Appalachian Trail!" and made sure certain pieces of information we needed to get in there got in.

I've done much the same. Whether it's maps or wayfinding or Native Americans or the French Huguenots or the swamps or the plants or old roads or Lawson's background or his technology or anything else, I did research before leaving, I try to drag interesting people onto the trail with me, and I try to avoid too much "Woohoo! Look at me! I'm on Lawson's Trail!" Now as then, the most interesting things to write about are the people I meet. Now as then, I am enormously behind in telling you things I haven't got around to telling you yet. Now as then, I'm the storyteller -- and the narrator. I'm your eyes and ears, bringing you to the story. I'm not the story. I forget that at my own peril.

Anyhow. It was a treat to see a bunch of wonderful journalists 20 years after we did something of which I'm still very proud. I'm still pretty impressed that they even let me hang around with them back then. And I'm hoping one or more of them will join me on the Lawson Trek before all is said and done. I'm grateful for all I learned from them, and I'm grateful to be on the trail again.

As Lawson would have said had he had the reason and the capacity, stay tuned.